15

Stack Exchange is no longer supporting blogs and will be terminating all instances of Blog Overflow that are currently running. We currently have a Blog Overflow blog, but it hasn't been active recently. Some of our current and former community members created The Whiteboard blog on GitHub and it is more currently active.

We have choices:

  • We can get a data dump of the data from the CM team to move elsewhere.
  • We can convert the current blog static pages.
  • We can link to the new blog. This is probably done in conjunction with the conversion to static pages.
  • We can have the entire blog deleted entirely.

What should we do?

13
  • 2
    Can we redirect to consolidate to a single source?
    – Aaron Hall
    Nov 16, 2016 at 19:59
  • @AaronHall I believe that would either be getting a data dump (or manually moving the content over - it is CC-BY-SA like the site), putting it onto a single source (like the GitHub pages), and converting the blog to static pages for attribution purposes.
    – Thomas Owens Mod
    Nov 16, 2016 at 20:00
  • Has SE asked for this? Otherwise, I don't see why we couldn't just leave it where it is.
    – Robert Harvey
    Nov 21, 2016 at 15:59
  • @RobertHarvey Yes. Blog Overflow is going away. We must make a decision and I need to get it to the CM team this week.
    – Thomas Owens Mod
    Nov 21, 2016 at 16:17
  • Has anyone given some thought to moving the Whiteboard blog on Github to the official Blog Overflow blog? Why is the Github one more popular? (seems like most of those posts are from MichaelT)
    – Robert Harvey
    Nov 21, 2016 at 18:08
  • @RobertHarvey That's not possible. Stack Exchange is terminating Blog Overflow for all sites. They are no longer supporting a blog. The options above are the only options and are being presented to all sites with a current Blog Overflow blog.
    – Thomas Owens Mod
    Nov 21, 2016 at 18:10
  • OK, now I understand. Did they provide some sort of public notice?
    – Robert Harvey
    Nov 21, 2016 at 18:10
  • @RobertHarvey I'm not sure. I looked on Meta.SE and only saw a single comment. I was pinged in chat by JNat to bring this up to the community here, probably since I happened to be online at the time. As far as I know, this only impacts the community-specific blogs and not the official Stack Exchange blogs.
    – Thomas Owens Mod
    Nov 21, 2016 at 18:13
  • 1
    Eh, they must not want to spend resources on it anymore. That's too bad; it would be better to try and figure out why SFF is the only active blog, and find ways to fix whatever problems the platform has, rather than doing away with it entirely. The whole point was to have a "fourth place," but frankly Blog Overflow felt like it had a lot of friction for writing new posts. I'm not even sure what the process is.
    – Robert Harvey
    Nov 21, 2016 at 18:17
  • @RobertHarvey It wasn't that well integrated into the platform. It would be nice to have a blog, IMO. But it should be integrated into the platform and the existing moderation tools (including voting and moderator flags).
    – Thomas Owens Mod
    Nov 21, 2016 at 18:21
  • meta.stackexchange.com/questions/287176/…
    – Robert Harvey
    Nov 21, 2016 at 18:45
  • @ThomasOwens How do we Initiate Option 1??
    – Morons
    Dec 30, 2016 at 18:47
  • @Morons We don't at this point. The accepted answer below has been forwarded to the SE CM team almost 2 months ago now. I'm not sure if you can still get a data dump or not, but the consensus (+13/-0) was that we wouldn't be moving to a new blog
    – Thomas Owens Mod
    Dec 30, 2016 at 18:53

1 Answer 1

Reset to default
14

While The Whiteboard blog shares the name and its early history with our Software Engineering chat room The Whiteboard, it is in spirit and in practice completely separate from this site. Most discussion about it happens in a non-public chat room. It is a community blog only in the sense that it grew out of this community. It should not and cannot be used as an “official” blog for our Software Engineering community.

For that reason, it would also be wrong to transfer old Blog Overflow posts to The Whiteboard blog. But since our Blog Overflow blog has seen little interest over the last years, I don't think we really need a community blog, and should look into other ways to preserve that content. Converting the Programmers Blog Overflow site to static pages seems the most sensible way to go forward, provided our SE overlords are willing to keep the servers running.

That said, The Whiteboard blog would be glad to publish interesting software-development related articles. If you have an interesting topic, open an issue with a draft and I'll see what we can make of it :)

6
  • maybe one could check with our overlords about opening blog.so for user-contributed blog-posts instead of blog-overflow
    – Vogel612
    Nov 22, 2016 at 15:10
  • Since there were no alternative answers or objections, this has been sent to the SE CM team as what we want to do.
    – Thomas Owens Mod
    Nov 24, 2016 at 10:41
  • @ThomasOwens: I don't see any harm in moving some of the content from the Programmers blog to the Whiteboard blog, if the Whiteboard curators want some of that material.
    – Robert Harvey
    Nov 25, 2016 at 18:09
  • @RobertHarvey That's not going to happen. MichaelT started the Whiteboard blog for his software-development related writing that he didn't want on Programmers.SE. Note that he then left this community. The blog is effectively private, and not intended as a service to the community here. I apologize for the confusing name that suggested otherwise. And if BlogOverflow is kept readonly but online, the existing blog posts will be just as alive as in any other place. I don't see any particular reason why they need a new home.
    – amon
    Nov 25, 2016 at 19:15
  • 1
    Didn't realize that blog was closed to outsiders. You're right, the name is a bit misleading.
    – Robert Harvey
    Nov 25, 2016 at 19:19
  • If the old blog is going to be mothballed, should it first be renamed from Programmers to Software Engineering?
    – TRiG
    Dec 5, 2016 at 13:08

You must log in to answer this question.

Not the answer you're looking for? Browse other questions tagged .